Cause for Celebration!

Mississippi Teacher Receives 2008 Pat Mitchell Award

Kris Winter, a first grade teacher at South Pontotoc Elementary School, is the 2008 recipient of the Patricia B. Mitchell Memorial Service to the Profession Award. The award is given each year to one exceptional teacher consultant of the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute (MWTI), the state network of seven university writing projects. Presented at the MWTI annual Visioning Retreat, the award honors an educator who continuously gives his or her energy to the work of MWTI or local writing project site by designing and/or leading professional development, leading work groups or research teams, or initiating new ideas to enhance the service capacity of MWTI. The award honors the work of the late Pat Mitchell, a Forest, Miss., high school teacher and an exemplary teacher-consultant who contributed much to MWTI and its work. The teacher consultant chosen for this award must be an exceptional classroom teacher who shows leadership at the local school level, must have developed and shared outstanding instructional practices, and must be dedicated to the art and craft of writing. This year Rhett Mitchell, husband of the late Pat Mitchell, as well as Judge Tom and Norma Ruth Lee, friends of Pat Mitchell, all of Forest, attended the awards ceremony in Jackson. Winter, a teacher for 13 years, is a graduate of the University of Mississippi, and a Mississippi State University Writing/Thinking Project Fellow. She is the wife of Marty Winter, the mother of two sons, Reid and Ryan, and the daughter of Doug and Patsy Patterson, all of Pontotoc.
WRITE CONNECTION Writing Conference

On June 13-14, 2008, teachers will gather in Oxford from all corners of the state as they celebrate the teaching of writing in Mississippi. This year's theme will be "The Write Place, The Write Time," and will be hosted by the University of Mississippi Writing Project. The conference is open to all educators. In 2006 Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute (MWTI) started an annual tradition, a statewide writing conference joining hundreds of writing teachers from across the state, teachers with a common purpose: to be better writing teachers, teachers who would learn from each other and the experts of grades K-University level in all subject areas. Because our state network consists of seven project sites, we are presented with the somewhat unusual dilemma and happy problem of summer fellows and teacher consultants not knowing the other teacher consultants in the state. In the past, the summer fellows who did not attend the NWP annual meeting might not have the opportunity to go to another writing project conference. The idea of a statewide conference was born to give the summer institute fellows their first meeting with other writing project teachers and to continue to give them writing project opportunities year after year. The dates were planned to coincide with the last weekend of each of the projects' summer institutes in June. The tradition began in June 2006 with the Write Connection conference, "Methods for Improving Student Achievement," hosted by the MSU Writing/Thinking Project on the Mississippi State University campus in Starkville. South Mississippi Writing Project hosted the second annual conference, "Exercising Our Right to Write," on their campus of University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. The June 2007 conference brought together 170 educators, including current summer institute fellows from the writing projects statewide. The program began on Friday afternoon with a writing marathon around places of interest in the host area. Project sites sported colored tee shirts that proclaimed their project affiliation. That evening a barbeque social was held in the restored Hattiesburg Train Depot. South Mississippi teacher-consultants had decorated the tables with vintage tablecloths and jars of flowers from their own gardens. The fifties/sixties theme continued as participants were encouraged by resident poet Nick Beat to write their own "protest poetry." On Saturday in the new Thad Cochran Conference Center on campus, Mississippi writing project teacher-consultants presented sixteen concurrent sessions, covering topics from writing in science and math classes, to teaching students in poverty, to making a difference in the community through writing. Rich Raymond led the Keynote Session. Raymond, Chair of the English Department at Mississippi State University, and former director of the Little Rock, Arkansas, and Coastal Georgia Writing Projects, spoke about the effect of writing on freedom and liberty. He is the author of Teaching American Literature at an East European University: Explicating the Rhetoric Of Liberty, which tells of his Fulbright professorship experience in Albania. The Lunch Session featured author Mary Anna Evans, the Hattiesburg math prodigy of our very own teacher consultant, Beth Harrison. Mary Anna, now of Gainesville, Florida, shines as a true success story to the teaching of writing across the curriculum. With degrees in physics and engineering, Mary Anna is the creator of the mystery novel series, featuring archaeologist Faye Longchamp. Her novels are Artifacts, Relics, and just released this spring, Effigies, set in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Mary Anna's lunch talk was "Because Engineers Need to Construct Sentences as well as Bridges." Commenting on the 2007 conference, a participant noted that it was "rich with all of the essential ingredients and heart of the writing project!" We feel that this annual conference has proved to be a worthwhile effort. Each year the number of non-writing project participants grows, giving us a grand stage to introduce ourselves and writing project work to them.
Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute Plays Vital Role in New State Writing Assessments

The Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute (MWTI), in an exciting new partnership with the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE), will play a critical role in the new Mississippi Writing Assessment. MDE is currently developing customized writing assessments that will be fully aligned with the 2006 Mississippi Language Arts Curriculum Framework, Revised. The assessments will be administered to students in grades 4, 7, and 10. The developed assessments will replace the writing assessments that are currently administered in grades 4, 7, and 10. Development of writing prompts, writing prompt selection, and field-testing for the Mississippi Writing Assessment will occur during the 2007?2008 school year. Administration of the English II Subject Area Test for students in grade 10 will be unchanged for the 2007?2008 school year. The first live administration of the Mississippi Writing Assessment will occur in October 2008 for grade 10 and in March 2009 for grades 4 and 7. Writing prompt development, field-testing, and anchor-paper selection processes will include Mississippi teachers selected by MDE and will be facilitated by MWTI, whose representatives will also train the scorers who read student responses for the Mississippi Writing Assessment. "MWTI is thrilled to be working with Mississippi teachers in the development and administration of the new writing assessment. No one in the country has a better understanding of the teaching and learning of writing than writing project teachers," said Kim Patterson, Director of the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute." MWTI, a unit within the College of Education, is the state network of seven writing projects located at the following universities: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Mississippi Valley State University, Mississippi State University, University of Mississippi, University of Southern Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi, Gulf Coast.
Another MWTI program, Rural Voices Radio, a partnership with Mississippi Public Broadcasting (MPB), features Kindergarten through college students and teachers reading their own writings that celebrate the traditions of family, culture, and heritage of Mississippi. In its fifth year of operation, Rural Voices Radio airs on MPB statewide twice each weekday, at 12:49 and 5:59 p.m. Through its history, Rural Voices Radio has served approximately 1800 students and 75 teachers, providing them an exciting opportunity to publish and affording them the mentoring of writing coaches. The following are quotes from students, a parent, and a teacher involved in Rural Voices Radio:
- "My teacher gets us to write a lot. It makes school easier because you can say anything you want on paper. I'll definitely submit some more writing to be read on radio." [Siedah, 9th grader]
- "I just started writing because my teacher inspired me. I enjoy it." [Tarren, 9th grader]
- "It was different from anything I've done before. It was fun to read on the radio. I just took the state (writing) test. It wasn't hard. We write all the time in our class." [James, 4th grader]
- "You just have to listen to the kids. They are trying to express themselves in such creative ways. Not only do they learn from us, but we learn from them, too. My son was very shocked when his piece was chosen. I was really proud of him. I am amazed at how he goes into detail with his writing." [Parent of James, 4th grader]
- "There's just not a better authentic way to teach writing out there. My students and I owe a lot to Rural Voices Radio for giving us the encouragement and motivation to keep writing." (Debbie Vanderford, Teacher)
MWTI continues in its research initiative, collaborating with the National Writing Project, UC Berkeley, to determine what really works in the teaching of writing. In recent work, researchers compared pre and post writing assessments of hundreds of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students whose teachers were involved in writing project professional development with closely-matched students in a school not involved with a writing project. MWTI students showed statistically significant improvement in the holistic scores and in each analytic trait of writing: content, structure, voice, sentence fluency, diction, and conventions. MWTI professional development for teachers can make a significant difference in the writing scores of students. Source: National Writing Project Research, 2007
MWTI held its first-ever scoring conference, July 18-22, 2006, on the MSU campus. Thirty-nine teachers scored 4000 student papers, and learned quite a bit about writing and teaching in the process. Since Mississippi Department of Education did not administer writing assessments in grades 4 and 7 in spring 2006, MWTI in collaboration with Program of Research and Evaluation for Public Schools (PREPS), offered standardized writing assessments for grades 4, 7, and 9. Approximately 10 school districts participated in supplying student-written essays.
In 2006, Governor Haley Barbour and the Mississippi Association of Partners in Education (MAPE) recognized MWTI and Okolona School District as Mississippi's top school district/community partnership.
Okolona School District has worked with MWTI for five years in professional development for its faculty. Projects in 2005-2006 have included a series of parent, community, and student workshops, as well as the debut of a student newspaper at the high school. This year's work was made possible by a grant from the Appalachian Regional Commission to MWTI. In addition, donation of staff and press time for the student newspaper from the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and countless hours of volunteer time from Okolona faculty, parents, students, community members, and Mississippi State University staff enabled the success of the grant work.
Programs like the Okolona partnership are duplicated many times yearly throughout the state. From July 1, 2003, through June 30, 2004, MWTI conducted 282 multiple-session programs and served 4,587 teachers for 111,934 total contact hours with Mississippi teachers. From July 1, 2004, through June 30, 2005, MWTI conducted 248 multiple session programs and served 4,365 teachers for a total of 99,606 contact hours. From July 1, 2005, through June 30, 2006, MWTI served 3,804 Mississippi teachers through 188 multiple session programs for 116,837 contact hours.
MWTI was awarded the Governor's Education Achievement Award for Higher Education in 2002.